Features

With everyone tooled up on cider, rum and whatever else they've got stuffed in their pockets, the mood at End of the Road was little short of ebullient this evening: not that you'd know it from Midlake's set on the Garden stage.

Being a singer-songwriter is a tricky business. Which route do you take? You can always attempt to bludgeon your audience into submission with the sheer power of your one act show, or you can entrance them with the ethereal magic of your fragile performance. So far, we've seen both sides of the singer-songwriter paradox (well, as we like to call it) in just a few hours at End Of The Road Festival, first with Stephanie Dosen's disturbing, delicate folk and then with John Doe's straight-down-the-line country blues.

The Dorset countryside - lush, green and verdant. Good for dairy farming and Thomas Hardy novels, but hardly the place for one of this summer's best folk, post-rock and Americana festivals? Well, we reckon it's perfect. Everyone at End Of The Road Festival seems to be enjoying the varied acts, relaxed atmosphere and country estate setting that equals Latitude Festival in the beauty stakes. The myriad stalls selling premium local cider are, of course, just a plus. Ahem.

Apart from a few Beach Boys and Kosmische things I picked up in America in the early ‘90s, I’ve never been much of a bootleg collector; never had the time, I guess, with so much legitimately released music to get hooked on. As a consequence, my knowledge of Neil Young’s “Chrome Dreams” was limited to hazy memories from rush-reading Jimmy McDonough’s “Shakey” until news of “Chrome Dreams II” broke a few weeks ago.

Today: Led Zeppelin, Detroit, 1969

It occurred to me last night, a minute or so into “Dance Dance Dance”, that I might have been a little blasé about this latest visitation from Brian Wilson and his band. As Alexis Petridis noted in his excellent review of the first night of Wilson’s latest Festival Hall residency, there’s a vague feeling of “nostalgia fatigue” surrounding these dates. I’ve seen him do “Pet Sounds”, “Smile”, and great further swathes of his gilded back catalogue, and I haven’t seen many better gigs in the past decade. But did I really need to see him do it again?

So today at Uncut we've been frantically finishing the issue, struggling in vain to make an online streaming of the new Om album work and, oh yeah, doing a lot of interviews with various radio and TV stations about this Led Zeppelin reunion.

Another playlist today. There is one other record we've played, but without appearing too corny and clandestine, I'm going to keep its identity secret for now, since we got hold of it by faintly nefarious means. Hopefully I'll be able to post something more revealing in the next few days. In the meantime, here's today's selection; a bit of a curious lot, when I write them down. . .

Exclusive to Uncut.co.uk - Today: Nicky Wire tells us about Sonic Youth in Cardiff in 1988

I’m not sure how keen I am on the current trend for groups to reform, especially when, as is the case with, say, The Police and Genesis, I have actually much preferred them in their absence.